[ExI] Space Decentral: A decentralized autonomous space agency

[Adrian Tymes]

On Apr 13, 2017 7:44 AM, "Giulio Prisco" <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Adrian. Some advantages of blockchain-based DACs, from the
perspective of participants / shareholders and compared to traditional
shares, are:
- Possibility to buy shares and participate anonymously.


Investors with serious money rarely care for anonymous participation - and
those that do, already have means to (proxies, for example).

- Self-enforced right to easily participate in all decisions.


With much money, and thus much shares, they get outvoted if their proposals
run counter to the interests of - or they just can't convince - a majority,
just like in normal corporations.

- Possibility to offer services to the DAC as independent contractor (work
2.0).


They have this even without buying a single share: the DAC can work with
anyone it collectively decides to.

- More protection against fraud.


Less, actually, by trying to work around and shun so many of the
protections in law.

Concerning your point about payments, paying a contractor in dollars
is not the problem. In a DAC this could work as follows. Suppose you
are a contractor who doesn't want to have anything to do with
cryptocurrency and I am a DAC member who interfaces with you.:
- You submit a deliverable to me and invoice $100,000.
- I request authorization to pay you $100,000.
- The members vote on accepting the deliverable.
- If the vote is positive a smart contract sends crypto funds to an
exchange where the crypto is converted to dollars and the dollars are
delivered to me.
- I pay you.


Ha ha ha ha ha...

Yeah right.  If I am a contractor who is competent*, I am going to insist
up front on a contract that guarantees payment on delivery.  The DAC does
not get to vote on whether to accept, save that the DAC votes yes.  If the
DAC votes no, the DAC can expect to be sued and lose quickly, with damages.

(There are exceptions, such as work so shoddy that the judge would agree it
is shoddy.  But good luck proving that, and you would likely get a lawsuit
anyway.)

* I say this having been a contractor in kind of that situation.  I still
have the court order for payment somewhere in my paper files.  The corp
that tried this dissolved, and the one responsible fled the state and
possibly the country rather than pay me.  A space DAC would be routinely
dealing with contracts for much, much higher amounts than the few thousand
dollars in my case.

The problem is: what if I don't pay you and steal the money instead?
Smart contracts protect internal transactions against fraud, but not
external transactions like this.

This use case becomes easier if you accept to be minimally involved in
the process. For example you could have an account on the exchange and
receive the payment (in dollars) directly.


And most contractors competent to provide hardware for space stuff won't.
They prefer the law, which is not subject to the hacking or other
vulnerabilities that the DAO demonstrated.

In general, the issues are at the interface between DAC and the
external world. There is no pure DAC solution: I think a DAC that
wants to operate as a real-world business needs a legal identity, a
front company in a favorable jurisdiction with named individuals in
charge, a bank account, ability to hold property etc. One of the
articles that I listed has examples of how things could be set up in a
specific jurisdiction (UK).


So your problem reduces to, what advantages does a DAC have over a
traditional corporation, given that most elements of significant financial
value will refuse to engage with blockchain et al instead of traditional
means (such as the law & courts, seeing blockchain et al as less effective
at protecting their interests), thus negating any benefits for their
transactions that a DAC might have?

You can't just think of benefits to the DAC.  Blockchain benefits the DAC
but disadvantages outside parties: despite what you say, it does - or at
least outside parties will believe it does, which is enough to prevent them
from using it.  So how do you overcome that?  Merely claiming benefits to
the cryptosavvy & anonymity-preferring (which the outside parties you are
likely to work with on a space venture are generally not) won't cut it,
especially if you ignore the proven disadvantages.
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